Monument
by Bowles
Summary: It’s really quite funny, I suppose, how delicately built monuments of tribute and effort can crumble into nothing in mere moments. Nathaniel


I'm back, I guess. And now we've got a category! So as a present (I hear you snorting,you know) for any Bartimaeus readers out there, I bring you this little bundle of joy (still snorting, I presume) to commemorate our new category!

**Disclaimer: **Don't sue me. Oh, and I do not own the Bartimaeus Trilogy.

**Monument**

It's really quite funny, I suppose, how delicately built monuments of tribute and effort can crumble into nothing in mere moments. Yes, it is a dark, disturbing sort of humor, but it's quite true.

For example, take an elegant glass vase. Beautiful, they are, and they are made with the utmost care by the glass blower. He shapes his creation slowly and surely, until finally, it is complete.

But then, with the slightest tip of the table, the vase can fall to the floor, shattering into millions of shards. All that's left after the fall are those shards, little reminders of the hard work put into such a beautiful piece of art.

You might ask me why I ever would ramble on about such an odd topic. After all, glass is breakable. Glass is weak. Strong vases glass do not make. I'll be blunt. I'll be simple.

That vase is my life.

That glass vase is everything I worked hard for, everything I ever sought and everything I suffered for. You think you're up there, untouchable, undefeatable, until the table tips ever so slightly and everything comes falling down.

_"The boy who was Nathaniel is fading, almost gone now…"_

So says the demon, the slave, the one with no care for others. His survival and well being is all that matters to him. There is no one else worth anything. He is the Alpha and the Omega. At least he is to him.

But as painful as it is to admit it, he's right.

Nathaniel is dying. He's been dying. He's been trying to hold on these four long, painful years, but he can't possibly survive when he can't breathe. John Mandrake has been smothering him under a thick blanket of darkness and deceit. No fire can burn without oxygen. Not even a spark can exist if oxygen is absent.

I used to wonder what space is like. I've heard wonderful and terrible stories about it, tall tales of alien life and chronicles of explorers. I have heard the astronomers whispering excitedly in their towers, looking at the heavens with awe in their eyes. They wish to feel what it is like in the great beyond, to neighbor the stars.

I know what it is like. It's so cold you can break into pieces of yourself, and the nothingness is so enveloping you can't hope to breathe.

I pity Nathaniel. I really do. But there's nothing I can do for him now. It's much too late. Maybe weeks, months, years ago he could have been saved, but he's felt the lick of flames on his fingertips and he is slowly burning. Soon, there will be just ashes in his place. Mandrake has grown too strong.

And yet, Mandrake is weaker than he ever has been. Because he is no longer John Mandrake, respected magician. He is John Mandrake, man with regrets.

Hold on. Scratch that. It is not "**man** with regrets," but "**boy** with regrets." For he never even grew up. Ambition and greed clouded his childhood, fogging the path, and he never found his way to maturity.

And now I am looking back on my life, and it's much too late. I realize what I have become. But who am I? Am I Nathaniel, whom the dark confines of the abyss created by hunger for power have weakened so considerably? Or am I Mandrake, whom the lust for more and the ambition so gripping have corrupted to the brink of humanity?

I don't know, I guess. There are a lot of things I don't know. I've been finding that out recently.

I wonder what it is to love, to feel true happiness, to have friends, to have fun. I've never really experienced any. I've been living this poor excuse of a life, this shell of something better, for as long as I can recall. I have dove into the deep pools of my memory, yet I don't remember any feelings even close to this. I don't remember any pure feelings.

Ah. Pure. I thought we might hit that little snag.

Pure.

Kitty.

Perhaps the purest person I have ever known was Kitty. Although, I didn't have much of a chance to get to know her. I was trying to manipulate her to my own desires the whole time I was in her company. And Bartimaeus, grudgingly agreeing to help me, knew it the whole time. He knew she was better than me. I could see it in his eyes. I was just too vain to recognize it.

And then, I was the one who got her killed. What irony.

I still can't comprehend why she went after the golem, when I would have watched as my enemy foolishly tried to activate the Staff. I suppose I would have laughed at the look of triumph on his face right before he fell on his rump, knocked out.

But yet, she saved me from the golem, dying in the process.

I suppose it's sad that I can't understand why she saved me. Why would she? Who would save someone like me, such a horrid and wretched piece of filth?

Maybe she saw something good in me.

But then again, I don't know. I never will, either.

But for right now I am just a monument. A monument of what has been, what could have been, what should have been.

For right now, I am just a monument, a tribute to everything wrong with the human race. Everything wrong with society. Everything wrong with myself.

I am just a monument, I guess.

A monument of nothing.


End file.
